Nasdaq MarketSite studio photographed in 2006, not Tesla’s listing ceremony. Luis Villa del Campo · CC BY 2.0. Cropped and laid out with Teslhub graphics.
Archive article written on 9 November 2026.
On 29 June 2010, Tesla Motors shares began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker TSLA. For the Palo Alto company, which had already delivered more than a thousand Roadsters, the listing marked a new stage in its relationship with financial markets.
What the offering included
The initial public offering was priced at $17 per share. It comprised 13.3 million shares, but the company was not selling all of them: Tesla offered 11,880,600 shares, while existing stockholders offered another 1,419,400.
That distinction matters when reading the figures. The total value of the shares offered was different from the money raised by Tesla. The company expressly stated that it would receive none of the proceeds from the selling stockholders’ shares.
A milestone in the company’s growth
The listing brought a manufacturer to the stock market that was still very different from the company people would know in later years. Its delivered product was the Roadster, and its stated aim was to make electric cars progressively more affordable. TSLA made a stake in that industrial project tradable; the $17 figure refers to the original IPO price, rather than a current share price.
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